On Monday, a two-hour energy-water nexus special session was held featuring multiple aspects of LIINES research.

The presentation entitled “Extending the Energy-Water Nexus Reference Architecture to the Sustainable Development of Agriculture, Industry & Commerce.” provided a high level overview of the types of couplings that exist not just within the energy and water infrastructure but also within end-uses in the agricultural, industrial, commercial, and residential sectors. Water and energy balance principles were used to systematically highlight the existence of trade-off decisions with the energy-water nexus.

The presentation entitled “Extending the Utility Analysis and Integration Model at the Energy Water Nexus” featured LIINES research done in collaboration with the Water Environment Foundation (WEF). This work argued the need for integrated enterprise management systems within the water utility sector to support sustainable decision-making.

The presentation entitled “The Role of Resource Efficient Decentralized Wastewater Treatment in Smart Cities” featured LIINES research done in collaboration with the German startup Ecoglobe. This work argued the need for resource-efficient decentralized wastewater treatment facilities as a key enabling technology in the energy-water-food nexus. It then presented Ecoglobe’s WaterbaseTM as such a technology.

On Wednesday, a three hour workshop entitled “Smart Food at the University of Guadalajara (UDG)” was lead by Diana Romero and Prof. Victor Larios. It featured the university’s efforts to bring hydroponic farming to future cities. The workshop also highlighted the UDG’s collaboration with the MIT Media Laboratory’s City Farm Initiative.

Both sessions drew participation of 40-50 conference attendees and active dialogue during the Q&A sessions. It is clear that a smart city — by all definitions — is one that actively manages the supply and demand for energy, water, and food as an integral activity. These two sessions demonstrated this need and looks to become a central theme within the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative and its flagship international conferences.

Several days ago, we wrote a blog post to announce the beginning of the First IEEE Smart Cities Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico. Now that the conference draws to a close, we can firmly say that the conference by all measures has been a tremendous success. The conference had over 500 registered participants drawing from academia, industry, and government — fully in agreement with the triple-helix model of innovation. From industry, dozens attended from IBM and Intel alone. The conference also benefited from the presence of the Governor of Jalisco, The Honorable, Aristóteles Sandoval, as well as several generous industrial sponsors.

The conference also distinguished itself for its focus on civic engagement, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Aside from the ample opportunity for networking and lively conversation, the conference featured a “Student Hackathon”. For two days, student teams were challenged to develop, in real-time, cloud-based Smart City Apps on iOS and Android platforms. The winning teams developed apps for smart transportation, healthcare, and community service and won monetary prizes of 500 & 1000USD. The LIINES wishes these teams all the best as they form small businesses to bring their apps to the market.

Today, Monday October 26th 2015, the first International Smart Cities Conference begins in Guadalajara, Mexico and will continue until Wednesday October 28th. It is the premier annual conference sponsored by the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative. Smart Cities are innovative, conceptual, and city-wide technology-human-infrastructure integration platforms. The conference brings a broad perspective to Smart Cities drawing from a variety of disciplines. This is evidenced by its 9 tracks including:

Smart Grids

Internet of Things (IoT)

Smart Homes & Buildings

Smart Transport

Smart Environment,

Smart Manufacturing & Logistics

Open Data

Smart Health

Smart Citizens

Here, at the LIINES, the concept of Smart Cities is one to which we have been paying attention for quite some time. Naturally, with the four research themes of Smart Power Grids, Energy-Water Nexus, Transportation-Electrification Systems, and Industrial Energy Management, we believe that the LIINES has a lot to contribute to the development of intelligent infrastructure in cities of the future. Prof. Amro M. Farid has been nominated to the IEEE Smart Cities Conference steering committee and also serves as the Workshop & Tutorials co-chair. He is also track chair for the Smart Grids track to be held all day today.

Interested readers can join the IEEE Smart City Initiative and its associated LinkedIn group. Additionally, the conference organizers will be live-tweeting on Twitter #IEEESmartCities, #ISC2. Join us in the developing the Smart Cities of the Future.

The LIINES seeks 1-2 quantitatively-minded Dartmouth undergrads for participation in a smart grid research competition. This work is a direct extension of our prior work in the smart power grid research theme. The competition involves multi-agent system negotiation techniques as applied to power system operations and management. The work can serve as part of a senior thesis or an undergraduate research opportunity.

The successful student(s) will be driven by a sincere interest in the smart grid field and have an affinity to object-oriented programming. Engineering science or computing science majors are preferred although preparations in heavily computational disciplines such as physics, applied mathematics, and economics are welcome. A prior portfolio in an object-oriented programming language is required. C++ is specifically preferred. More senior undergraduate students are preferred although initiative, interest, and programming fluency will be the determining criteria.

Recently, the vision of academia and industry has converged, defining future power system as intelligent, responsive, dynamic, adaptive, and flexible. This vision emphasizes the importance of resilience as a “smart grid” property. It’s implementation remains as a cyber-physical grand challenge.

Power grid resilience allows healthy regions to continue normal operation while disrupted or perturbed regions bring themselves back to normal operation. Previous literature has sought to achieve resilience with microgrids capable of islanded operation enabled by distributed renewable energy resources. These two factors require a holistic approach to managing a power system’s complex dynamics. In our recent work (e.g. link 1 and link 2), we have proposed as means of integrating a power system’s multiple layers of control into a single hierarchical control structure.

In addition to enterprise control, it is important to recognize that resilience requires controllers to be available even if parts of the power grid are disrupted. Therefore, distributed control systems, and more specifically Multi-Agent Systems have often been proposed as the key technology for implementing resilient control systems. Multi-agent systems are commonly used to distribute a specific decision-making algorithm such as those in market negotiation and stability control. However, very few have sought to apply multi-agent systems to achieve a resilient power system.

The purpose of the paper entitled “Multi-Agent System Design Principles for Resilient Coordination & Control of Future Power Systems” is two fold. First, it seeks to identify a set of Multi-Agent System design principles for resilient coordination and control. Second, the paper assesses the adherence of existing Multi-Agent System implementations in the literature with respect to those design principles.

The set of design principles is based on newly developed resilience measures for Large Flexible Engineering Systems. These measures use Axiomatic Design and are directly applicable to the power grid’s many types of functions and its changing structure. These design principles, when followed, guide the conception of a multi-agent system architecture to achieve greater resilience.

About the author: Wester C.H. Schoonenberg completed his B.Sc. in Systems Engineering and Policy Analysis Management at Delft University of Technology in 2014. After his bachelors’ degree, Wester started his graduate work for the LIINES at Masdar Institute, which he continues as a doctoral student at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2015. Currently, Wester is working on the integrated operation of electrical grids and production systems with a special interest in Zero Carbon Emission Manufacturing Systems.